The legacy you leave is the life you lead. And leadership can be a powerful tool for good—whether leading a team or developing your individual potential to achieve your personal best. Let us help you chart a course to a deeper sense of purpose and mission to serve.

Developing, nurturing, and empowering—this is you at your personal best as a coach, consultant, facilitator, or human resource professional. Explore this website to find the tools you need to train and coach aspiring leaders to achieve the extraordinary.

Anyone can learn to be a great leader—young people in high school and youth groups, undergraduates and graduate students, and executives advancing along their personal leadership journey. If you're in the business of educating emerging leaders, we're here with the evidence-based resources to help you build the foundation for transformative leadership education.

Leadership Role Models

"Think global, but act local" is not just a phrase for sustainability; it also can be applied to how we behave as leaders. It turns out our most important role models are "local". They are the people with whom we interact and have contact with the most.

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner continually want to know who leaders view as their role models for leadership. What is striking about their collected data is that given categories from which to choose, most leaders over age 30 report that a family member has had the most influence on them (46%). Business leaders or direct supervisors account for 23%, followed by teachers or coaches at 14%. These are the people we learn from.

Carol Dweck, a social psychologist at Stanford, adds to this inquiry in her studies on the difference between individuals who have a growth mindset compared to those with a fixed mindset. If we see leadership as something we can learn and a skill we can acquire, our role models have a greater positive influence on our behavior. One of the basic foundational beliefs of The Leadership Challenge model is that extraordinary leaders are constant learners and that this mindset is necessary for effective leading.

We can draw two conclusions from these observations: 1) Our role models from our youth continue to influence our values and behaviors as leaders, and 2) they become integrated into or compared with those in our professional world who also affect us most closely, our managers.

As a leader, do you believe that you continue to learn from your role models? The questions below may prompt some thought and discovery.

The most important role model from my past or present is:

The lessons or messages about leadership that I learned are:

Is leadership something I can learn?

By reflecting on these inquiries, you'll likely be thankful for people who have inspired and motivated you along your developmental path. Sometimes our role models taught us lessons that were not spoken but observable—they modeled the way by "walking the talk." Kouzes and Posner's research would concur: "The life you lead is the legacy you leave."